Saturday, 3 August 2013

It seems many people I ask struggle to tell the difference between being intelligent and being well -informed. Many people I know in fact seem to think being well-informed is being intelligent.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

Although the desire to learn and retain information can be a characteristic of intelligence, it is by no means a conclusion.

Being well-informed is a by-product of curiosity coupled with a good memory. That's all.

A book full of important information is not intelligent. It is well-informed.

Being well-informed is having the memory to retain information and recall it at will. Well-informed is a computer RAM chip's only claim to fame. It stores and recalls information. It is not a clever part of the machinery. The complex and smart part of the computer is its Processor. In other words, the processor makes sense of the boundless information stored in the RAM

An intelligent person's brain has the capacity to dissect and analyse all the information stored and make sense of it. Being intelligent is having the gift of knowing what to do with the information and reaching logical conclusions with it.

It appears that the world's educational services continues to fail gifted children, or at least fails to bring out the best in them.

Education Authorities the world over try to turn children into clones of the educators who run and devise the system. Do we need a world full of professors? Especially given the fact that lots of professors are not very intelligent in the first place.

Many professors, scholars and so-called intellectuals are mere information-storage devices. Or the human equivalent of RAM chips. Many have the intelligence of a gnat (no disrespect to the mosquito-like biting little fly) but think otherwise.

This is one of the reasons so many of these studied and well-informed people, albeit bereft of intelligence and logic, come out with such tripe as "God Hates Gays" and "Support Capital Punishment and Freedom To Carry Arms while at the same time they're against women's rights to choose abortion.

So, the easiest way to classify humans is by referring to people as "RAM" or "CPU" types.